🚨 Important: Framework support is currently limited to Express. Vitals currently ships with an official adapter for Express only. Support for additional Node.js frameworks is planned.

Vitals provides real-time monitoring for Express applications through middleware-based request tracking and a built-in live dashboard.

⚠️ Note: Vitals is designed for live inspection and debugging — not long-term metrics storage or alerting.

🚂 @vitalsjs/express

Express.js integration layer for Vitals.

@vitalsjs/express connects Express applications with the Vitals engine by providing request tracking middleware and a dashboard router.

📥 Installation

npm install @vitalsjs/express

or:

pnpm add @vitalsjs/express

📋 Requirements

• 🟢 Node.js >= 18
• 🚂 Express 4 or 5

🚀 Quick start

import express from "express";
import { VitalsEngine } from "@vitalsjs/core";
import {
  createVitalsRouter,
  vitalsMiddleware,
} from "@vitalsjs/express";

const app = express();

const engine = new VitalsEngine().start();

app.use(
  "/vitals",
  createVitalsRouter({ engine })
);

app.use(vitalsMiddleware(engine));

app.get("/api/health", (_req, res) => {
  res.json({ ok: true });
});

app.listen(3000);

Open:

http://localhost:3000/vitals

✨ Features

• 📡 Request monitoring — automatically tracks Express traffic
• 📊 Live dashboard — built-in Vitals UI route
• 🔁 SSE streaming — real-time browser updates
• ⏱️ Latency tracking — request duration measurements
• 🚦 Status tracking — HTTP status distribution
• 🛤️ Route tracking — aggregated route metrics
• 🔐 Authorization support — protect dashboard access

🧩 Middleware

app.use(vitalsMiddleware(engine));

The middleware records:

• request count
• response duration
• status codes
• aborted requests

📊 Dashboard router

app.use(
  "/vitals",
  createVitalsRouter({
    engine,
  })
);

Available endpoints:

| Method | Path | Description | | ------ | --------- | ------------------ | | GET | / | Dashboard UI | | GET | /events | SSE metrics stream |

🔐 Custom authorization

createVitalsRouter({
  engine,
  authorize: (req) => {
    return req.headers.authorization === "Bearer token";
  },
});

By default, dashboard access is restricted to loopback clients.

🛡️ Content Security Policy (CSP)

The dashboard serves a standalone HTML application and automatically sets a route-specific Content-Security-Policy header.

This policy only applies to responses served by the Vitals dashboard routes and does not affect the rest of your Express application.

⚠️ Mount order

Mount the dashboard router before the middleware:

app.use("/vitals", createVitalsRouter({ engine }));

app.use(vitalsMiddleware(engine));

This prevents the dashboard's long-lived SSE connection from being counted as application traffic.

🔌 Related packages

• 📦 @vitalsjs/core — metrics engine
• 📊 @vitalsjs/ui — dashboard interface

📄 License

MIT © 2026 Ayush Jain